Pointing Domain to AWS EC2 Instance using AWS Route 53

I am currently hosting this blog on AWS EC2 with Bitnami Ghost. When I initially set it up Amazon had a public DNS which was not human friendly. I wanted to use my domain (amirsahib.com) as the actual url of my Ghost blog. After some Googling I found out that I needed to set up an elastic IP address and point the domain to that IP address. I actually went a step further and decided to use Amazon Route 53 and point my name servers to Amazon's name servers. This worked out great because when I wanted to verify my domain to use AWS SES for emails, it automaically detected that the domain had a hosted zone in Route 53.

Anyways here are the steps I took:

Add a new hosted zone with the domain

Whoever currently manages the DNS for the domain, update the name servers to the ones Amazon provided when you added the hosted zone.

Add the elastic IP to your EC2 instance by going to the VPC service.

Go to your EC2 instance in the AWS console and copy the elastic IP address.

Go to the Route 53 service where you created the hosted zone and add 2 records:

domain.com is the name, A is the type, Alias is set to no, leave the default TTL, and add the elastic IP to the value.

Do the same as above but for the name add www.domain.com

And that's pretty much it. Now you don't have to use AWS Route 53, but I was trying to learn all the various offerings AWS provided so I thought I might as well try it out.